JOE’s Game Review: Forza Horizon 2

JOE has been drifting, racing and photographing our way through the stunning European vistas of Forza Horizon 2, so here’s a look at how we’ve been getting on with the game.

We’re massive fans of the original Forza games here in the office, but every once in awhile, when we’d play the original track version of the game, we’d race around wishing that we could break free from the barriers, marshals and the rules and instead, take our hoonigan shenanigans to the streets. Thankfully, that’s exactly what Forza decided to do with the first Horizon game back in 2012, which centred on the Horizon Festival, located in the state of Colorado, USA. For its second outing, Forza Horizon 2 has shifted continents and the festival is now being held in southern Europe, focusing on southern France and northern Italy. Visually, the game is absolutely stunning and we made good use of the camera function that allows you to take a picture of your car and surroundings at any moment – even if you’re travelling well in excess of 200km/h. The cars really do look incredible and with well over 200 to choose from, petrolheads are sure to get their fun out of just looking at what cars are available, let alone actually driving them. We certainly did. One of our favourite new features in Forza Horizon 2 is the new ‘Bucket List’ challenges that sees gamers getting behind the wheel of some seriously rare and exotic cars in order to beat the challenging task at hand, such as attaining ’20 near misses’ in a Pagani Zonda C, which is easier said than done. There are Bucket List challenges for both the French and Italian sections of the map and you can even compete in co-op Bucket Lists online too. That brings us to the online mode of Forza Horizon 2. Naturally, you’ll have more craic if you play with a couple of your mates, but even still, joining an online session without knowing anyone can be great fun too. You can choose to free roam where you can explore southern Europe until you find a race that takes your fancy, or you can take part in a series of races against other online players in a mini championship to see who’s the best racer out of the lot. Another great thing about Forza is that there are no A.I. drivers. Instead, Forza takes track of everyone’s driving/racing style and then uses that information to create ‘drivatars’ for you and your opponents to race against – much like Forza 5. So not only will you be racing against opposition that acts and reacts like a real driver – even if you’re playing solo mode – your own drivatar will be able to pick up points for you whenever you’re not playing the game, as it races against other people for you. It’s a very cool system and it’s a seriously easy way to pick up some spare change. Racking up the spare change is a lot easier than you might think at first and after just a few hours of racing we had enough cash to buy one of our all-time favourite sports car – the Mercedes Benz SLS AMG. The game has also added a few new radio stations this year, one of which is a classical music station called Radio Levante. To be honest, we weren’t really sure what to make of it at first, but after driving a Lamborghini Veneno through the rain to Tchaikovsky’s ‘1812 Overture’ (the one with the cannons) we knew we had found our new favourite Forza Horizon radio station. It just makes driving supercars at ridiculous speeds feel all the more grand and epic… The only negative thing we can think to say about the game is that it can get a bit stale if all you do is race through the Forza Horizon Festival championships without doing some exploring, either in solo mode or online. Even taking a break from racing altogether to focus on taking top-notch photographs or to find the rare and elusive Barn Finds really helps to keep the game fresh and entertaining. The graphics of Forza Horizon 2 are absolutely stunning, the physics are spot on and the car selection is large enough to keep the likes of Jeremy Clarkson and Jay Leno happy. So if you’re a petrol head, a classic car lover or a gamer that likes to explore open worlds in fast machines then you’re going to love Forza Horizon 2 as much as we did.